... exactly what is that? I was looking at some Samsung HDDs and didn't pay attention at first, so I thought it was the L2 cache level. But the numbers were kinda high and that's when I realized it actually said buffer dram...

the former: buffered ram is typically used on servers. There is a register that stores the information taken from ram for a clock cycle, which somehow offloads some work from the memory controller and allows more memory to be installed in a system.

the latter: from what I understand, the HDD cache is a middleman between the data on the hard drive and the drive interface (IDE, SATA, etc...). Higher cache amounts translates to a longer burst transfer* (burst transfer is much faster than sustained transfer...ideally around 300MB/s for SATA 3GBps burst and around 70MB/s sustained)

*this is if my assumption about how cache is actually used is correct. I assume the the buffer is first completely filled before sending data to the mobo

I was looking at IDE HDs at about this time (obviously the last generation) and found one with 32 megs of cache!! I was like that's CRAZY!! But then I read that it's all a ploy, and IDE/133 drive can't even use much more than 8mb of cache anyway so it was just another one of those marketing ploys. Just an FYI I thought I'd add